Colored Perspectives: A Multidimensional Poetic Performance of a (Re)Imagined Canvas for Critical Dialogue and Engagement

• In Event: Response Abilities II: Generating Arts-Based Research With Martin Luther King Jr. and Maxine Greene at the Maxine Greene High School for the Arts and Imaginative Inquiry

Abstract

Colored Perspectives: A Multidimensional Poetic Performance of a (Re)imagined Canvas for Critical Dialogue and Engagement

Purpose
The purpose of this multidimensional poetic performance is to serve as an introspective means through which to recognize marginalized perspectives and an opportunity to promote a unified call to justice through a (re)imagined, blank canvas for civic dialogue, engaged discourse, and engagement with issues of social justice. As this performance art would take place at the Maxine Greene High School, it is appropriate that the (re)imagined canvas would “look at things as if they could be otherwise,” a key tenet within the mission of the Maxine Greene educational community.

Perspectives
In this performance, the authors (re)imagine a blank canvas for new versions of civic dialogue, engaged discourse, and engagement with issues of social justice by incorporating the craft of multidimensional call and response poetry (Cahnmann, 2003), considering entanglements of both oppression and liberation (G. Anzaldúa, 2009; hooks, 1990; Minh-ha, 1989), and using musical performance and embodied art making with various expressions of color to demonstrate such entanglements.

Methods
Building on previous outdoor poetic performances and reflective poems on such performances (Authors 1 and 2), we will use information from the daily discursive oppression in public education and educational research, processed through our individual minds, bodies, and spirits via call and response poetry. We will integrate sound and color into our performance where one of the co-authors will provide auditory accompaniment, and the performers and the viewers will engage in coloring the blank canvas on the performers bodies. We will use photography to document various stages of coloring and layering until the performance is completed for further introspection and analysis.

Significance
This performance art will invite the authors and audience to engage in difficult dialogues that confront historical and current struggles in public education and educational research and reflect on our respective roles as activists and change agents.


References
Author 1 and 2

Anzaldúa, G. (2009). Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauqui imperative - la sombra y el sueño In A. Keating (Ed.), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (pp. 303-318). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Anzaldúa, G. E. (2015). now let us shift...conocimiento...inner work, public acts. In A. Keating (Ed.), Light in the dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality (pp. 117-160). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barbezat, D., & Bush, M. (2014). Contemplative practices in higher education: Powerful methods to transform teaching and learning. San Francisco, CA: Josey Bass.
Cahnmann, M. (2003). The craft, the practice, and possibility of poetry in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 29-36.
hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End Press.
Minh-ha, T. T. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Palmer, P. (2014). Healing the heart of democracy: The courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit. San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass.
Zajonc, A. (2009). Meditation as contemplative inquiry: When knowing becomes love. Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books.

Authors

• Meaghan Cochrane, Kansas State University

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University